Sam Fender | Biografie

 

In the autumn of 2022, Sam Fender found himself zooming along a dizzying career peak, propelled by the phenomenal success of his second album, Seventeen Going Under. While 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles had topped the UK charts and he already had two Brit Awards under his belt, this felt like something else entirely.

 

Seventeen Going Under had been universally acclaimed as a modern masterpiece and on the week of its release, outsold the rest of the top ten combined. The Rolling Stones invited him to support them, he played to a sold-out crowd of 45,000 people in London’s Finsbury Park, and booked in two massive hometown show at his beloved St. James Park in his hometown of Newcastle selling over 100,000 tickets in a matter of minutes.

 

“It was mad. It was too much, too fast,” Fender remembers today. “This is obviously what I signed up for. When I was working in a call centre eating Pot Noodle this is what I would be dreaming of all day long, but sometimes you don’t know what you’re saying yes to. I was exhausted and didn’t know how to deal with everything. I knew I needed to take a break.”

 

Fender reluctantly slammed the breaks on and took six unplanned weeks off to regroup and try and get his head around what his life now was. However, once the dust started to settle, he realised that stepping away from music wasn’t what he needed. It wasn’t helping.

 

“I thought I needed time off because I was burnt out, but in reality I just needed some time off touring. And too much time off is dangerous. The last time I had any time off I didn’t have any money. If you give me seven months off now with disposable income, I will spend it on nonsense,” he laughs before getting to the nub of it: “Stopping made me realise the stopping isn’t actually what I needed. I realised that what I need is to be creative.”

 

Not for the first time, Fender saw that the path ahead for him was going to come through his music.

 

The songs for a third album had already been percolating in his head for a while, he’d even recorded some with one in mind, but affording himself some time to pause and reflect gave him a different perspective on what he wanted to say and where he was at in his own life: on the cusp of 30, looking back at where he’d been and where he might be going next.

 

As ever, Fender’s thoughts returned to home, to North Shields and the community and the people who made him who he is. Splitting his time unequally between the capital and Newcastle, there’s never any doubt on where he calls home

 

“I’ll always end up writing about Newcastle,” Fender says. “Even though I’ve effectively moved out, I still spend so much time there seeing my mates. We’ve all grown up together. They’re at the point where they’re starting to play house, now. Kids and mortgages, getting their own gaffs and getting married. They’re still fucking lunatics, but we’re at this really transitional period. I’ll always be a part of that because it’s where I’m from, but obviously my life has become very different at the same time.”

 

“I’ve heard people say that with this job your age freezes at the point where it all kicked off,” he continues. “I do feel like I’ve been frozen in a time capsule doing this which is ridiculous. I mean, I definitely don’t *look* like I’m 25 anymore!”

 

On Hypersonic Missiles, Fender drew inspiration from the lives around him in North Shields: people trying to scrape through the week and make it to Saturday, the souls lost to unemployment and suicide. Then for Seventeen Going Under, he turned that gaze inwards, the camera focusing in on his own coming of age story in a Springsteenian sweep of drama. On People Watching, however, the perspectives shift, often within songs themselves. Those closest to Fender are here – his friends, loved ones and family – but there’s also his own experiences and battles, internal and external, and much wider questions and reflections.

 

“On Seventeen… I really went in there with this concept that it was going to be about youth,” he says. “Eventually, that always ends up morphing into something else, but this time I just went in free as a bird and wrote whatever the fuck. It’s much more varied because of that.”

 

Whittling down close to 70 songs, around 50 of which were recorded to some degree, Fender cherry-picked eleven songs that – whether he intended it or not – provide a rich picture of exactly where and who he is at this moment in time: the people and events that have shaped him, the word around him and the loves, passions and beliefs that drive him.

 

The opening title track finds him travelling to and from a palliative care home as his lifelong friend and mentor, Annie Orwin passed away.

 

“She was like a surrogate mother to me. She ran a drama group on Saturdays for kids in the community centre and was the first person who ever really believed in me,” he recalls. “As I grew up, we became friends. We’d share a bottle of wine and just bitch about the world. She was larger than life and I loved her to pieces. When music started kicking off for me, she’d always be like: ‘Why haven’t you mentioned me in interviews? When are you going to thank me in an acceptance speech when you’re winning those awards?!’”

 

The glistening Nostalgia’s Lie deals specifically with his feelings about home and his past, coming to a realisation that he’s guilty of “yearning for a time that never really existed”. Chin Up, meanwhile, began as a critique of wellness culture before shifting towards fears about his friends struggling with unemployment and drug addiction.

 

“It got me thinking about my mate who has really struggled and all these people in the country who have had no support for decades,” he says. “These people are preaching from a place of privilege. Crystals aren’t going to help you when the bailiffs come knocking.”

 

These are concerns that he raises again on Crumbling Empire’s blue-collar lament. The song begins with him witnessing the abject poverty of “a Detroit neighbourhood left to ruin” while he was on tour in America, and while it concedes that Fender, now a successful musician, doesn’t “wear the shoes I used to walk in”, he then reflects on the impact Thatcherism and privatisation had on his own family and community.

 

“Homelessness in Newcastle is ten times worse than it was ten years ago,” Fender explains. “It does make you think, if I hadn’t had the luck I had and been discovered what would I be doing? Me and me mam were really skint at that time. It was scary. It only takes a few daft missteps, and you can be out on the streets.”

 

Class, inequality and social injustice also fuel some or the fire beneath TV Dinner’s Dylan-esque broadside. What Fender describes as “a chip on the shoulder tune” which also turns its ire towards the crushing effects of celebrity culture. “That typical toxic and often media-led tactic that the British are famous for of building you up just to knock you back down,” as he scathingly puts it.

 

The euphoric Little Bit Closer changes tack to take a look at Fender’s relationship with faith and the dogmas of organised religion, but he still saves plenty of criticism and analysis for himself. The twisting folk rock on Wild Long Lie finds him ruefully racking up “the dark side of the kitchen session”. A regret that hangs over into the remorse and heartache of “pissed up break-up song” Rein Me In. And while the song “fell out of the sky in ten minutes” in the studio, Arm’s Length revealed an admission of his past failings as a partner and his struggles to let people in. “It’s an anthem for avoidant dickheads” he states, smiling.

 

Sonically, the heart-lifting vistas which connected to so many across Fender’s first two albums are still here, but the songs on People Watching are given a little more space to breathe this time around, and there’s a whole new palette of sounds and textures helping Fender paint his pictures. Thanks in no small part to the role of The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel as co-producer. Separate album sessions were helmed by Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arcade Fire) in the production chair.

 

Granduciel doesn’t tend to produce other artists but after a phone conversation in which they both raved about their shared musical loves he agreed to come and board.

 

“Not only are The War On Drugs one of my favourite bands but it turned out we love all the same stuff,” says Fender. “You can hear his touch on everything, particularly the synths, all these layers and little melodies.”

 

You can hear how Fender’s songs sparkle in this new setting particularly in the joyous, Tom Petty-meets-The Waterboys Something Heavy.

 

“That’s probably my favourite song right now,” Fender says. “It’s about accepting that everyone’s fucked up and we’re all dealing with something. It’s a plea to look after each other – a pisshead’s anthem for togetherness.”

 

People Watching closes with perhaps one of the most unashamedly sentimental tracks Fender has written. A beautifully moving torch song he wrote about his late grandparents and their lives together in which he turns in a soaring vocal tour-de-force backed by the distinctly northern sound of colliery brass band.

 

“My mam’s side of the family were all down the pits so I wanted to have a miners’ brass band on there,” he explains.

 

“I went through all these bands and I chose Easington Colliery Band because they were the best one that I heard and they’d won all these competitions. We recorded them, and fucking serendipity- there is a very high likelihood some of the maternal side of my family  worked in Easington as they were in mines all over County Durham. I didn’t know it until me mam told me. That’s the universe at work right there.”

 

He might not have realised it at the time, but on People Watching Fender has pulled together a collection of songs that not only look back into his own recent, and not so recent past, but also dig into the very roots of who he is.

 

“It’s just a collection of songs about the human experience.”